Video phone communication systems provide visual and audio communication between two or more users during a communication session. A video phone at a first location can transmit and receive audio and video signals to and from a video phone at a second location such that participants at the first location are perceived to be present or face-to-face with participants at a second location and vice versa.
Video phone communication systems span a variety of applications. One contemplated application of a video phone system includes facilitization of a communication session of a hearing-impaired user (e.g., deaf or hard of hearing), because many individuals with significant hearing loss are not able to communicate effectively over conventional telephone systems that rely upon voice communications. The hearing-impaired user may use a video phone during a communication session to relay his or her expressions over the video phone communication system. Such video phone communication systems may facilitate communication sessions between different hearing-impaired users (e.g., video phone to video phone communication), or between a hearing-impaired user and a hearing-capable user (e.g., video phone to voice phone communication), which may be assisted through a video relay service (VRS) that may provide an interpretive (i.e., translation) service by providing a hearing-capable translator who relays the expressions of the hearing-impaired caller to a hearing-capable user on the other end of the communication session in a conventional manner, such as through the use of a voice-based dialogue conveyed over a conventional voice phone. The hearing-capable translator may also translate the voice-based dialogue back to the hearing-impaired user into expressions (e.g., American Sign Language (ASL)).
Video phones are sometimes used to facilitate communication between more than two users. In such instances, a display of the video phone is conventionally divided into a plurality of segments, and each segments displays video received from a different video phone. Conventionally, once each of the plurality of segments is assigned to display video received from a different video phone, no more participants may be added to the conversation. The number of participating video phones in a video conversation has also conventionally been limited by heavy computational and data transmission bandwidth demands associated with encoding, transmitting, and decoding video data.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,701,930 to Dasgupta et al., the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by this reference in its entirety, describes automatically selecting a limited subset of participants of a video conference for display by using audio detectors to determine which participants spoke most recently. The remaining participants operate in a voice only mode, are not displayed, and computing power and network bandwidth are conserved by suppressing their video output.